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00:00The last of my three stops in Yorkshire involved boiling sugar,
00:03human talent, and the most surreal souvenir I got on the entire trip.
00:08In the east riding of Yorkshire,
00:10just on the outskirts of a fishing port called Bridlington,
00:13I arrived at the John Bull Rock Factory.
00:17I don't think you could come up with a more English name than that.
00:21John Bull, the caricatured personification of England
00:24that fell rather out of fashion during the 20th century,
00:27and rock, which is difficult to translate to any other dialect of English.
00:326.30 in the morning, because folks who make candy get up early.
00:37Rock is a type of candy, or to use the English term, sweets,
00:41and I'm going to need to explain its significance later,
00:44not just to those outside of Britain,
00:45but I suspect these days to a lot of younger folks in the country as well.
00:48All you need to know for now is that it's not rock candy,
00:51it's not the crystallized stuff that Americans might know.
00:53It's more like a candy cane, only a bit more... riddle, without the bend,
00:59and usually with letters all the way through it, end to end.
01:02Usually the name of whichever seaside town you bought it in.
01:06So, let me introduce you to Albert and Charles,
01:09who are on deck early to start making rock.
01:1130 kilos of sugar, and about 19 litres of glucose.
01:16And we class it about 10 seconds of water.
01:19Right.
01:20So we turn the tap on, 10 seconds of water.
01:22As I say, that's just to stop it sticking.
01:24And that's all going to boil away.
01:26That's gone.
01:27The pan's cooking now, so it's up to you.
01:30What colours and flavours would you like?
01:32Oh, OK, what are my options?
01:34We've got a traditional pink mint, we've got all the flavours you can think of,
01:39orange, banana, raspberry, pear, colours.
01:42Oh, raspberry, raspberry will do nicely, yeah.
01:44Raspberry, OK, colour-wise, full casing of red, it's all stripes, definitely.
01:50It's all reddish, red and white, red and white stripes, yeah.
01:54English flag, and also your colours.
01:57Perfect.
01:57Red and white, raspberry, all right.
01:59Perfect, let's do it.
02:00We'll go for that, mate.
02:00Also, my colours, my filming uniform for this series was red and white,
02:04it worked out nicely.
02:06Now, Charles said that the pan was cooking,
02:08which sounds much less dangerous than it actually is.
02:11The pan is a boiling cauldron of sugar, glucose syrup and water.
02:17Oh, I can feel the heat off that.
02:19Like, that's, what, 135, you said?
02:22It will be 135, but at the moment the thermometer's reading 113,
02:26so we've got a little bit to go, yeah.
02:27OK, so that's just steadily ticking up.
02:29And there's just a giant gas burner under there.
02:32That's 135 Celsius, so about 275 Fahrenheit.
02:36Molten sugar burns are particularly bad,
02:39because not only does the heat scold you,
02:41you can't rinse the sticky goo off easily.
02:44It clings to you while it's retaining all that heat,
02:46and it might take some skin off with it.
02:49So I stood well back as they rigged up the cauldron on their equipment
02:52and poured out the sugar syrup mixture onto a table.
02:56That's not putting me in the middle of this.
02:58And it looks just like a bubbly liquid.
03:01It looks like it isn't dangerous.
03:08I have to keep reminding myself that that is boiling sugar water.
03:13That's boiling sticky sugar water.
03:16See, the water's just there, just to stop when it first starts.
03:20It helps it mix and stops it sticking to the pan.
03:23Oh, so most of that's boiled off.
03:24That's gone, the water's gone.
03:25So that's just…
03:26There isn't a lot of water.
03:27That's just sugar syrup.
03:29It's pure sugar.
03:31The table is divided into sections.
03:33That's so they can keep different colours separate.
03:35Oh, so that's the colouring going in.
03:37That's the colouring going in.
03:38So we have ten minutes, roughly, to play on here.
03:42Ten minutes?
03:43About ten minutes.
03:44About a quarter of the rock is going to be red,
03:46the rest is going to be white.
03:47It doesn't look white yet, we'll come back to that later.
03:50I did set up a wide-angle camera to catch some shots that I might miss,
03:53but it really did not like the fluorescent lighting in there,
03:56so we're going to stick to my POV camera for most of this.
04:00Because if they left it, it'd go like glass.
04:02Right.
04:03Underneath.
04:03So it's set like a sheet of glass.
04:05Oh!
04:06And that's within ten minutes.
04:07So it has to get stirred up, no matter what?
04:09Yeah, we have to cut it up and mix it.
04:11The sugar's already being folded into sheets
04:14after just a few seconds on the table.
04:16It's now an amorphous goo,
04:18cooled enough that it can be handled,
04:19at least by people who understand the safety part.
04:21They mixed the red into one section of it,
04:23and then I got handed a bit of the goo that had cooled off at the side.
04:27Is that safe to...?
04:28That's how it sets like, yeah, yeah.
04:30Yeah, that'll be quite cool.
04:31Huh!
04:32Sorry, Jeffs.
04:32That's how it goes.
04:33That's set like, that is set like glass.
04:36Yeah.
04:36And it's not sticking.
04:37And it will cut you as well.
04:39If you break that, it'll be sharp.
04:41Wow!
04:42I don't know what I'm expecting, this is pure sugar, but you know, it's...
04:47Yeah, that's pure unflavoured sugar.
04:49Of course it tastes good, it's pure sugar.
04:52I'm going to put that away before I eat far too much of it.
04:54If you ask someone from Yorkshire to tell the story,
04:57they might say that the inventor of rock was a man named Ben Bullock,
05:00an ex-miner who'd moved over to Yorkshire from Lancashire and become a confectioner.
05:05Plain rock without the colours and letters was already a thing sold in fairgrounds,
05:08but Bullock was on holiday in Blackpool in the 1880s and had an idea.
05:12He came back home to Yorkshire and made the first modern rock,
05:15with words running through it.
05:17And those words were...
05:19Woe Emma, the title of a then-popular music hall song.
05:23Because inexplicable phrases and in-jokes have been part of pop culture
05:27since well before the internet, since well before today's kids started
05:30yelling whatever they're yelling right now.
05:32Woe Emma is listed in Green's Dictionary of Slang with quotations that seem to show that
05:37not only was it known across the country, but people were getting really tired of it.
05:41And it's almost completely forgotten now. I did look it up.
05:44There are two more recent songs with the same name. It's not them.
05:47I had to track down a copy of the sheet music in the British Library,
05:50and it turns out the lyrics are a man complaining about his alcoholic wife.
05:55Because it's out of copyright, I asked a composer I know, Ben,
05:58to create a couple of lines of the chorus as it might have sounded in the music hall.
06:02Woe Emma, woe Emma, Emma, this will never do.
06:05Woe Emma, woe Emma, Emma, I'm ashamed of you.
06:08That wasn't really exciting enough,
06:11so I also asked Ben to turn it into 1990s Dutch happy hardcore.
06:15Woe Emma, woe Emma, Emma, this will never do.
06:20Woe Emma, woe Emma, Emma, I'm ashamed of you.
06:25I make no apologies for that.
06:27Anyway, the story goes that Ben Bullock sold that first woe Emma batch locally,
06:31but his second batch said Blackpool, was sent to Blackpool, became a hit,
06:35and suddenly there was Seaside Rock.
06:38Some of that is probably true, but there's a reference in Henry Mayhew's book,
06:42London Labour and the London Poor, which I also pulled from the British Library.
06:45That's from a few decades earlier, and it says,
06:47the man who has the best trade in London streets is one who,
06:51about two years ago, introduced short sentences into his sticks.
06:55So it's fair to say that Ben Bullock popularised rock and commercialised rock,
06:59but probably didn't invent it.
07:02But also, his timing was right.
07:04The Victorians in the 1880s had invented the Seaside Holiday.
07:09The new railways had made the fresh air of the coast available to the working class,
07:13and up in the northwest of England, with the Industrial Revolution in full swing,
07:16whole towns would take their holidays at the same time.
07:20The factories would all shut down together,
07:22and lots of people would decamp to the same place,
07:26to the town at the end of the train line at the Seaside.
07:30The different towns would coordinate with each other,
07:32so there weren't too many people in the resorts at the same time.
07:34And those holidaymakers wanted souvenirs.
07:37You would bring a stick of rock back home.
07:39It's really cheap, and it's got the town's name running all the way through it.
07:43It was this small, edible, affordable piece of the Seaside
07:47that you could keep for yourself, or give to the folks who hadn't travelled out.
07:49And when most of the jobs were hard factory labour,
07:53and medical science wasn't anywhere near as advanced,
07:55there was a lot less concern about sugar.
07:57By the later part of the 20th century,
07:59a combination of cheap package holidays, industrial decline, and health concerns
08:03meant that going to the Seaside and giving your child a lump of flavoured sugar
08:07became less fashionable than it once was.
08:09But rock is still very much made, sold, bought, and eaten.
08:14John Bull have a shop in Bridlington, and the factory offers tours.
08:16Plus they make chocolates and cookies, and they have a gift shop.
08:19Rock is still a very cheap souvenir.
08:22And they've also expanded to have a kid's soft play centre next door,
08:25because it's important to have more than one income stream.
08:28Now that the colour's mixed in,
08:29the John Bull folks are going to cool the sugar goop down
08:31to a better working temperature.
08:33They connect the table to a cold water supply,
08:35so there's a constant stream running through it.
08:37Take off the safety gloves and instead dust their hands with what I think
08:40might be cornstarch to stop anything sticking.
08:42You see how it's changing and getting thicker and thicker and thicker, yeah?
08:46There you go.
08:47Have a touch of that, it's a bit sticky, but yeah, have a feel of heat still in it.
08:51Oh, that's slightly squishing, just hot enough that me,
08:54without my asbestos fingers, is just a little bit worried about it.
08:58Ah, you're fine, let me try.
09:00But that squishy proto-candy is yellow,
09:03and it needs to be white for Seaside Rock.
09:05The solution to that is the pulling machine.
09:07So too soft it'll fall off the pulling machine,
09:10too stiff it'll fly everywhere.
09:11Right, okay.
09:12It's got to be just right.
09:13And again, there's no measuring thing for that,
09:15you've just got to know.
09:17It's just knowledge and skill, and trial and error,
09:20I think, at the beginning, I reckon.
09:22That machine folds air into the proto-candy,
09:25changing the structure and making it a very pale white.
09:28That's your raspberry flavour going in it.
09:31So, we have white rock and red rock.
09:33The flavour's in the white, the colour's in the red.
09:35But as yet, we do not have the letters, and as far as I knew,
09:38they were going to make a tiny batch of candy that said Tom.
09:42And I can only describe what's about to happen as wizardry.
09:46It is someone who is extremely skilled, extremely well-practiced,
09:49just doing their job.
09:51So this is going to be the T?
09:52That's going to be, right.
09:54This is your name, now this is it.
09:56Yep, there we go, that's a T.
09:59So you've just got to remember the recipe for every letter,
10:03basically, and figure out.
10:04Yeah, yeah, the construction of it,
10:05you've got to know the full construction of how you make every letter.
10:08The candy is still warm enough to be pliable.
10:10If they need parts to stay separate, they dust them.
10:13If they need to make them stick, they wipe them down with water.
10:15And everything just ran smoothly.
10:17There's a T, an O, which is made by rolling the colour around a white central part,
10:22and then an M, which obviously, in hindsight,
10:25is constructed by making one half and then folding it over to the other side.
10:29And at that point, with all the letters inside the packing bars,
10:32I thought we were done, but then, with an unnecessary,
10:37but very impressive flourish of the scissors, he kept going.
10:41Well, hold on, are you doing a full name here?
10:44Oh, Scott, is that right?
10:45Oh my, yeah, I assumed it was just going to be Tom, because you can re-
10:48Okay, because I figured they could sell rock with Tom in it, right?
10:52There are a lot of Toms in the world, but no, full name.
10:55So those get stretched. Meanwhile, cut the stripes in half,
11:02put them next to each other, clean them up, and they just glue together.
11:08Yeah, just wet on the cloth, just water on the cloth,
11:11because it's quite dry, believe it or not.
11:13Hard.
11:14So you need it a little bit sticky, so we've just put water on the cloth,
11:18sticks it together.
11:19Right.
11:20So now we're going to build up one very large stick of rock,
11:24with your name in it.
11:28It's a little difficult to make out the name right now,
11:30but that's going to change, I'm guessing.
11:33I wish I could have thought of something less egotistical
11:35than my name to put in there, but I didn't know this was happening
11:38until I got there.
11:39And more than that, I didn't realise quite how much rock they were making,
11:43because there's a minimum batch size.
11:45That is about, what, 30, 35, 45, 50 kilos of rock with my name in it.
11:54That's a lot of rock.
11:55I did also get a quick go at lettering myself with some offcuts,
11:59and I started by saying the immortal words.
12:01How hard can it be?
12:02We're about to find you.
12:04Right, it's just Tom, right? That's the plan.
12:06That is the plan, just Tom.
12:07I will spare you the lengthy shots of me struggling to work as fast as a professional,
12:11partly because it's a bit boring and partly to save my ego.
12:14Physical dexterity is not exactly my forte,
12:17and again, sorry for the lighting on that side camera, it did its best.
12:20Highlights, though, I did say this.
12:23Wet.
12:24Wet.
12:25Wet.
12:25And then put that over the top.
12:27And put that over the top.
12:28And also this.
12:30Oh, I don't think my piece is thin enough.
12:32And also this.
12:34Not a big fan of that O, I'll be honest with you.
12:35Stretch it out.
12:36Stretch it out.
12:37Yeah, so it matches all the same length.
12:38The longer I took, the more that proto-candy cooled
12:41and the more difficult the job got.
12:43Charles said it was about six months to a year of on-the-job training
12:45before someone really had it up to professional standard.
12:48Even he's not an expert, it's been a while since he did it.
12:50Right, and then that should be Tom.
12:56It's not.
12:57I mean, we still have to break them.
12:59We still have to actually see what it's like at the core there.
13:01Well, um, we'll see.
13:04First, Charles's effort.
13:08Look at that!
13:13It does look a bit wonkier before it's pulled into rock.
13:15The stretching process will even things out.
13:17And anyway, compared to mine...
13:19I mean, I could have done worse.
13:20Hey, same.
13:21I could definitely have done worse.
13:24Meanwhile, what's happening to that 45 kilos of rock with my full name in it?
13:29Which is a service they do for corporate clients, by the way.
13:32If you're a business and you want to hand out candy canes with your company name,
13:34Let It All Through,
13:35or if you want something special for your wedding favours, they'll do that.
13:39My lump of rock was going into a single-purpose machine to do the stretching.
13:43Where it goes in, gets rotated back and forth, and it's steadily squeezed and squeezed and squeezed and squeezed.
13:50There's this colossal 45-kilo lump over there that's just been... spaghettified?
14:00So as we roll in it, we put a little twist in it.
14:03You see how I'm twisting?
14:06Right.
14:06Yeah, so we put a little twist just to make it a bit jazzy.
14:09It must keep it rolling, otherwise it goes squared.
14:12It's got the fans to set it now, so the fans are cooling it down rapidly.
14:17There's so much temperature management, isn't there?
14:19Yeah, that's the skill of it.
14:22Eventually, there was about 100 metres of rock with my name all the way through it.
14:28This is some of that rock, it's got my name through it, which is very, very strange, right?
14:33That's just a strange thing to say.
14:35I am uncomfortable with having my name in, well, not lights, but you know what I mean, right?
14:40Rock with your own name in it just sounds incredibly vain.
14:45They chopped it up, bagged it up.
14:47Oh!
14:50That's so much more gentle than I thought it would be.
14:53And then they gave me some of it, and it's really difficult to explain to a worldwide audience
14:58how much seaside rock is a thing and how much seeing my name in there is just like...
15:03No one, no one gets to see their name in a stick of rock.
15:06But I wasn't going to take 45 kilos of rock with me, what would I do with it?
15:09I'm not going to hand out vanity rock to people, that would be ridiculous.
15:12And where would I even keep it?
15:13I'm on a road trip, I'd end up with an ant colony in the back of my car.
15:16So the last thing I need to introduce you to is the chipper.
15:20Because it's not going to waste.
15:21That batch of rock, it was the warm-up batch.
15:24Get everything sorted for the day, before the serious stuff,
15:26before they start making the union jack rock or the corporate orders
15:28so they can check all the equipment works.
15:30That batch was turned into...
15:33broken rock.
15:34It gets mixed in with all the other test batches,
15:36maybe even factory errors or mistaken orders,
15:38and it gets sold in bulk at a steep discount.
15:40I don't know where that rock ended up,
15:42but if you bought a bag of candy at some point in the last few months,
15:45and a few pieces of it had my name in it, now you know why.
15:50Next time, the Magician of the North and some very dangerous light switches.
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